Many drivers of multi-passenger vehicles have encountered a situation in which a passenger has fallen asleep and failed to debark from the vehicle at their appointed destination. In the case of school buses this is particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Children tend to be lulled to sleep relatively easily by the motion of a vehicle, particularly at the end of a school day, and children in neighbouring seats are less likely to notice or to alert the driver when this happens.
It has been known to happen that a school bus driver parks the bus at the storage compound and leaves the bus for the evening with a sleeping child still on board. When this happens the results can be disastrous, especially to a young child who will awake to strange surroundings and may not know how to deal with being stranded or find their way home, leaving the child's parents in a panic and school officials trying to trace the child's whereabouts after all adults have left for the day.
Accordingly many multi-passenger vehicle operators, particularly school bus operators, require that each driver inspect his or her bus carefully for sleeping passengers before leaving the bus at the end of a run. Unfortunately, human nature often prevails and the bus driver who is in a hurry or distracted may not inspect the bus as required.
Further, in a multi-passenger vehicle with a turbo charged engine it is desirable to observe a "cool-down" period of several minutes when parking the vehicle 10 at the end of a run, before turning off the engine. Many drivers fail to wait the entire cool-down period before shutting down the vehicle, which can result in premature deterioration of the engine systems.
It would accordingly be advantageous to provide a warning system that prompts the driver of a multi-passenger vehicle to inspect the vehicle for sleeping passengers before shutting down the vehicle. However, to be effective in all situations such a system must be designed with the hurried or distracted driver in mind, and the driver must not be able to circumvent the warning system, while at the same time the driver must be able to disarm the warning system once the required inspection has been performed. It would further be advantageous to combine such a warning system with a means for encouraging a driver of a multi-passenger vehicle with a turbo-charged engine to delay shutting off the engine at the end of a run until the required cool-down period has elapsed.